Mac OS X 10.6 - Snow Leopard

Shouldn't the death of input managers make it a little harder for crackers to implement runtime cracks? ...

I don't know if I can live without adblock though... I think I'd be willing to drop Safari for another browser if that other browser had a plugin architecture to facilitate such filtering.

On the resource fork thing: It looks like it was the only way they could do their new little file compression thingy without breaking on older versions of OS X. I never really had anything against resource forks except that some internet hardware would sometimes automatically discard the resource fork somehow. Don't know how that happened, and don't know if it'd still be a problem. Compressing files before transfer got around the problem as I recall.

AnotherJake Wrote:I don't know if I can live without adblock though... I think I'd be willing to drop Safari for another browser if that other browser had a plugin architecture to facilitate such filtering.

I wish there was a way to fuse Firefox and Safari into one ultimate browser. I had been using Firefox for years because of its plugins and general niceties. But I was getting sick of how much CPU and memory it used up even when idle, so I recently switched back to Safari 4. Now I get a faster, more efficient browser, but no plugins other than Click2Flash. Plus, I hate Safari's tabbed browsing interface, and Firefox has a better history and bookmark system. Argh!

i currently don't have leopard setup for a direct comparison and probably it's not as much as 10x difference (i just remember it running somewhat fluid in leopard but now it's getting as low as 3-4 fps).

the source of of my performance issues seems to be the fragment shader (with iterative parallax loop, etc...), but i've not tried prerendering the depth buffer yet.

p.s: some of it was actually my fault (paging issue), but it's still unbearable (about 3x - 5x as slow)

One thing I have noticed is (are?) various little speed and efficiency improvements, likely due in part to so much of the system running in 64 bits now. Also, because it's running in 64 bits, I noticed one of my background processes because it was 32 bits, which was like m-audio firmware loader or something. Anyway, I removed that and my machine goes to sleep within a few seconds now. I thought taking 30 seconds to a minute to finally start sleeping was normal!

Overall, I'm pretty happy with 10.6 so far, with no major issues except that I miss ad-block. No seriously, Apple, I really really don't like crap moving on my page -- namely, advertisements distracting me.

Oh yeah, one more thing: Apple will you *please*, pretty-please, with sugar on top, add a friggen color picker to the desktop solid backgrounds?

Photoshop CS3 seems to be working fine for me too so far, but I haven't really done too much with it yet on Snow Leopard.

Frank C. Wrote:Bachus mentioned ClickToFlash earlier and I'll have to second that recommendation.

Ah yes, I meant to try that and forgot. Thanks for the reminder, that helps *greatly*. Still doesn't clear things out as nicely as AdBlock, but hey, I'll take what I can get for now.

I was also using adsubtract a while back, but it hasn't been updated since late 2007. Seemed like a great idea. Maybe someone might pick up some interest in it again and update it. Or maybe there's a better version around.

The css approach is probably the safest way to hide stuff but I'm not sure how all those rules would affect load times. As a web designer I'm a little mortified that it hides images and objects based on size alone though!

Some bugs/things I've seen (don't know if any of these are fixed by 10.6.1 yet):

1) Photoshop CS1 has a huge bug. At random times while trying to do a task all the apps you're running will force-quit and you'll be logged out and taken back to the log-in screen. Only happened to me so far with CS1, and it's happened three times so far. Not an isolated incident. Someone convince Adobe to make a non-crappy universal version of Photoshop plzkthx.

2) When I first installed Snow Leopard, if you option-dragged an item in the Finder, no green + would show up to indicate a copy. This seems to have fixed itself though. Weird.

3) Download a bunch of images or whatever from the web. Select them all in the Finder and double-click to open them in Preview. Only one will open. Close and re-double-click and two will open. Close and repeat and three will open. Etc etc etc. It's a one-time event with newly downloaded files. Some kind of bug with "quarantining" according to Google.

This is making for great some great insights for those of us yet to upgrade. Another question - is it really true Snow Leopard takes about 7 gigs less on your hard drive? That's enough to make me upgrade tomorrow if true!

monteboyd Wrote:This is making for great some great insights for those of us yet to upgrade. Another question - is it really true Snow Leopard takes about 7 gigs less on your hard drive? That's enough to make me upgrade tomorrow if true!

Yes, it did *appear* to free up multiple gigabytes for me. OTOH, it's hard to say exactly how much because they changed the meaning of a gigabyte to match the hard drive manufacturers' definition: 1 gigabyte now == 1,000,000,000 bytes. So instead of an 80 GB hard drive only having like maybe 74.5 GB like it used to (I don't remember the exact number, but it was a power of two), it now has like 80 GB. Tada!

One might take note that apparently this is a full install disk, and requires the honor system to be upgrading from Leopard (from what I've heard). I suspect that because of that little tidbit, and because of the price, Snow Leopard may be the baseline system going forward. Not that I'm suggesting the large majority of Mac users are less than honest, but ... well, you know what I'm saying I don't know why Apple doesn't just make it "available" for all Intel Mac users, regardless of whether or not they already have Leopard installed. But then again, I never understood the $30 charge for QT pro, nor do I understand why they're still charging for iPhone OS 3 for iPod Touch users when only like 1% have upgraded. I heard they're only charging $5 for it now, but I think they might have better success with a "lite" version ... but I digress...